Mom? Are You Here? #4
I couldn’t say we’re sober now, not exactly, but after a few hours of clutching each other and wincing, we’re able to stay on our feet. We even kept some water down, raided from the ruins of 04.
“Go ahead,” Kodiak says brusquely, pointing to the doorway.
“Maybe together?” I say.
His hand appears next to mine. Together we activate the portal. It sighs before it shudders open.
We keep our hands held.
On reflex, I turn on my headlamp. Then I turn it back off, because at that very moment a light blinks on inside the chamber.
“Look at that!” I say under its dim orange glow. A massive battery covers one wall of the storage chamber, its wires disappearing into the floor. “Auxiliary power!”
Kodiak lowers himself to examine one particularly large cable that leads to a nondescript box. “A generator. That appears to run on methane. Clever.”
“I’m going to assume, since mission control thought to design it that way, methane is a big part of what’s in these shallow lakes surrounding us.
” Methane has no scent, and without power running to the ships, I haven’t yet been able to run tests to determine the composition of the atmosphere—except for the low oxygen and obviously spiked nitrogen.
Mission control would have been able to select this planet based on spectroscopy: even from so many light-years away, they could have determined which colors of light were being absorbed on the planet, how much its atmospheric particles bent light, and how big they were, and thus have a pretty good idea of how hospitable to human life the environment would be.
It’s no accident that this is where OS worked so hard to bring us.
Kodiak leans past the box, moving surprisingly agilely considering his splinted leg, and hands me a big black padded envelope.
I open it. Inside is a book. A real vintage book! Hard polycarb cover, printed on plasticine pages. There’s a title on the front: Surviving Sagittarion Bb.
“Now that sounds like a good read,” I say, and open to page one.
“We can make it a bedtime story?” Kodiak says. He laughs, but then the laugh stops and he’s looking at me and I’m looking at him.
“It’s midday,” I say, standing and holding out my hand. “But it might be bedtime on Earth.”
He stands up without taking my hand. His body looms over mine.
Staring into my eyes all the while, he wraps his heavy arms around me, presses me close against his chest. He smells like the planet—clean, a little loamy. I breathe the human scent, enjoy the sensation of his body warming mine.
“There are things I’ve told myself to learn about from you,” Kodiak whispers, chin resting on the top of my head. “Something about welcoming and donating?”
“Yes,” I say, smiling. “We have lots of time for lessons.”
I go quiet, clutching the black book to my chest as I stare out at the alien landscape. “Between those times, we will fight to live.”
Somehow, before two weeks have gone by, we’ve constructed a full-on compound. There’s nothing casual about the process—our very lives depend on getting this right, and we toil for twenty-five of the thirty-one Earth hours in each day.
We start by placing the generator near the shallow methane swamp, so we’ll have a virtually unlimited power source.
The Endeavor’s landing stash also came equipped with algae, which I’ve spent most of our time coaxing into a garden.
It’s not just any algae, but bioengineered so that each strain produces a protein, a fat, or a carbohydrate.
Granted, they’re not the tastiest proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, but together they’ll provide complete nutrition.
While Kodiak works on powering up our systems, I plant the individual algal strains under polycarb sheeting that’s engineered to intensify the low solar radiation of the exoplanet.
There’s a lot I wish I could be doing—like getting a proper home constructed—but food is lower on our pyramid of needs.
One morning, Kodiak has rolled out of bed before me. I miss his warmth, which disappears so quickly into the polycarb. As I groggily get to my feet, wishing for some of the coffee my mind remembers but that my lips have never actually tasted, I hear Kodiak call my name.
He’s in front of the greenhouse, crouching beside what appears to be Rover. Or rather two Rovers that he’s combined to make a full sphere, with arms emerging from its equator. It’s very creepy and also very cute. “What have you done?” I ask Kodiak, giving him a quick kiss on the lips.
“Watch!” Kodiak says. “Rover, say hello to Ambrose.”
Rover rotates and rolls over the heath on the ground, until it’s right in front of me. The arms wave. “Hello, Ambrose,” OS says. “This is my form now. I’ve come to assist you and Kodiak.”
The sound of my mother’s voice on this foreign planet stops my breath. When it begins again, I’m wiping tears from my eyes. “Hi, OS.”
“I will be a better algae tender than either of you. Please let me take over those duties. I’m also happy to begin constructing roomier lodgings.”
“Kodiak,” I say. “This is amazing. OS is here.”
Rover-sphere chatters on. “I will be careful to keep the algae strains from escaping the polycarb greenhouse. We don’t want any unexpected interactions with the exoplanet’s organisms. I can tinker with the quantities to alter your nutritional intake—and even produce an alternative jet fuel should you someday wish that I print us vehicles.
There are many engineering designs in my storage. ”
“I’m going to go eat breakfast,” I tell OS while it whirs through the greenhouse, tending and watering.
“Good thinking,” Kodiak says. “I’m starving.”
As we eat our algae soup, I read to him aloud from the black book that had been hidden away behind the gray portal: if mission control is right, Sagittarion Bb has decades of environmental stability, followed by seasons of slow-moving cyclones.
We don’t know where in that cycle we’ve landed, but it’s relatively safe to assume that we won’t face those cyclones for a few Earth years.
Maybe even decades. At some point, though, we’ll need to be able to rapidly evacuate to elsewhere on the planet.
“I’ll get started studying the vehicle designs in OS’s storage,” I say.
“We’re eventually going to need to make this whole base mobile. ”
“Check this out,” Kodiak says, leaning against a printed crutch while he nudges the wall of our latest structure. It pushes back at him, like a bouncy castle.
“That’s, um, fun,” I tell him.
“Ambrose, I’ve gotten it to float! With the right composition of gases inside the hollow polycarb walls, it will stop being a habitat and start being—”
“A vehicle!”
“A floating balloon, yes. So once we really get going, we can predict the weather patterns, and move our entire installation as needed.”
“Let’s hope that’s not needed for a very long time.”
“Yes, nhut.”
“‘Nhut.’ It’s time I learned some Dimokratía. It’s not fair that all this has been on my terms.”
Kodiak looks at me with sudden gratitude.
“Thank you. I would be happy to teach you my language.” I stand alongside him, arm draped across his shoulders.
He’s a stranger, a lover, and my life partner.
We have lived and died lifetimes together, and it makes me shiver every time that odd truth comes over me.
“Hey, have you come across any regulations on how to name this planet?” I ask him.
“You’re the one studying the black book. I thought you said this was Sagittarion Bb.”
“Yes. How do you feel about making humanity’s last stand on something called ‘Sagittarion Bb’?”
He shrugs.
“I was thinking we might name it something a little more meaningful.”
“Like ‘Earth’?”
That shuts me right up. Human civilization on Earth is gone. We’re the last humans alive. Does that make this Earth? The prospect makes me feel like the narcosis has come back, like I could float right up into the atmosphere and go careening into the blue-green sky. Everything looms too large.
“Ambrose, are you okay?” Kodiak asks, eyeing me nervously.
“I’m a little faint, I guess.” I can’t look into his eyes, so I look into the sky, which gives me the view of the pale second sun.
That only makes me even more light-headed.
“I think I don’t want this to be another Earth.
I want it to be something else. Something new. Something better than Earth was.”
Without quite meaning to, I sit heavily. Kodiak kneels beside me, stroking my back.
“This has all been a lot to adjust to,” I manage to say.
Kodiak surprises me by nodding. Heedless of the sludge that soaks his pants, he sits beside me, takes my clammy hand in his. The struggle we face has drawn us tight. “Would binge-eating engineered algae make you feel better?”
I laugh despite myself. “I don’t think it would, oddly enough.”
He rubs his fingers into the centers of my palms, hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to relieve. “What would make you feel better?”
I look into his eyes. My first thoughts about what would make me feel better all involve his full lips, shrouded in stubble. But there’s something bigger than that in this heaving mind of mine. “I know she’s been dead for thirty thousand years. But I miss Minerva.”
He tilts my chin so he can look into my eyes. “I have a thought about that,” he says. “Since Sagittarion Bb isn’t quite cutting it. I wonder if you’ve had this thought, too.”
I peer into his eyes. “I don’t know, have I?”
I do know where he’s going with this, and I surprise myself by crying. Kodiak’s thumbs stroke away the tears. His skin is so soft, so new.
“Welcome to Minerva,” he says.
There are four greenhouses now, and Rover-sphere is in the process of printing the fifth.
A soft mechanical whining cuts the dawn air as our robot caretaker passes between the first four, tending the algal strains, testing for the right composition of oxygen, nitrogen, water.
The fifth unit is reserved for growing something else.